Sofia Sears, Question 1: How Will You Become Your Mother

Sofia Sears
QUESTION 1: HOW WILL YOU BECOME YOUR MOTHER?

Your body is a secret you forgot how to keep. A lesson in scorn
& sediment. Loose fingernails, fathers, passageways. A seabed
sucked dry, passing animals baited and bled. The surfaces hunger
for daylight. God help you salt-teeth & jelly-spine, god help
seasonless water. Your body is a freshly opened
underworld. Skip the lines, slip past the snarling ghosts. Hoard
your friction close. Invent islands, pretend your bones belong to
the birds. Home as in hell as in a wilted room you can’t
dissolve. Home as in a burst blood vessel in Persephone’s clenched
eye. Home as in your skin pretends. As in your teeth fit better
in her mouth. Your body is any other body. Unspecial, unfocused,
and yet, and yet. Your body is not a price but it is a sentence.
It hunts itself, poses in a lithe learned way, ready to be stalked &
crushed. Your body exits
pursued by a history like a knife-opened lip.

Sofia (Sof) Sears is a queer writer from Los Angeles whose cross-genre work has been featured in publications such as Waxwing, the Sonora Review, the LA Times, and numerous others. They recently directed and produced their feminist-monster play at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. Currently, they are pursuing their MFA/MA in Fiction and English in Northwestern University’s Litowitz Program. You can find them at sofsears.com.